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Eugene School District

Tardy South Eugene absent from ‘best schools’ list

The school was late submitting data for Newsweek’s annual list, which includes Sheldon and Churchill

By Anne Williams

The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Wednesday, June 23, 2010, page A1

Two Eugene schools — Churchill High School and Sheldon High School — are making an appearance on Newsweek magazine’s annual list of the nation’s best public high schools this year. But notably absent is perennial honoree South Eugene High School.

Look for it to appear in coming weeks on a revised version, however, Principal Randy Bernstein promised.

“It was just an omission,” said Bernstein, whose school has made the list every year since at least 2005. “One of our staff members — to remain nameless — who is supposed to send in the information, didn’t. We’ve since sent it in. I think it was (Superintendent George Russell) who contacted us and said, ‘Hey, this is odd; how come you guys aren’t on here?’ ”

The magazine’s policy is to amend its list if eligible schools belatedly send in the data the magazine uses to determine the so-called “Challenge Index.”

The index, developed by veteran Washington Post education writer and columnist Jay Mathews in the late 1990s, ranks schools by dividing the total number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests given at a school each year by the number of spring graduates. Schools with a ratio of at least 1,000 — meaning they had as many tests as they had graduates — appear on the list.

The index has been criticized for being too narrow. Mathews has argued that, while the ratio doesn’t begin to tell the whole story of a school’s quality, research shows that whether students have had an “intense academic experience” in high school is one of the best predictors of how well they’ll fare in college. Simply looking at how well students score on AP and IB exams, he said, gives an unfair advantage to the many schools that encourage only their top students to take them.

For schools to send students off to college without exposing them to high-level courses is “a form of educational malpractice,” Mathews wrote in Newsweek. “But most American high schools still do it.”

This year’s list, at least as it initially appeared on the magazine’s Web site earlier this month, numbers 1,623 — about 6 percent of the nation’s public high schools.

Mathews said South Eugene, which has twice ranked highest among Oregon schools, is not to blame for the omission.

“They can blame me for not tracking them down when we didn’t get a response to our first messages, which I think had something to do with us having a wrong contact,” he said.

Twelve Oregon schools made the list this year, and one — Corbett High School, a small rural school in east Multnomah County — ranked fifth in the country.

This was the first year Sheldon made the list. It was ranked No. 2 in Oregon and No. 665 in the nation, although it appeared that the data received included only results from the International High School, a half-day global studies program that culminates for many students with IB exams.

Churchill, which also made the list last year, was No. 8 in Oregon and No. 1,365 in the nation.

The rankings are based on data from the 2008-09 school year. New this year is an “equity and excellence” rating, which shows the percentage of all graduating seniors who had at least one score of 3 or higher on at least one AP test or a 4 or higher on an IB test sometime in high school.

Laurie Moses, the Eugene district’s director of high school services, said she doesn’t put too much stock in the Newsweek ranking.

“We need to look at lots of data that helps us decide how successful schools are,” she said, including student achievement growth over time and participation in College Now classes, which offer dual high school and college credit.

In his Newsweek piece, Mathews strikes an apologetic tone for the rankings, but not the index itself.

“I was startled that people remember what their school’s rank was in previous years,” he wrote. “The important thing is that your school is on the list, not where on the list it is.”